Harvey Firestone

• Born: December 20, 1868
• Birthplace: Columbiana, Ohio
• Died: February 7, 1938
• Place of death: Miami Beach, Florida

American inventor and industrialist

Firestone’s rubber tire innovations and business savvy made him one of the wealthiest tire entrepreneurs in the United States during the advent of the automobile industry.

Sources of wealth: Patents; sale of products; real estate

Bequeathal of wealth: Children

Early Life

Harvey Samuel Firestone was born in 1868 on his family farm in Columbiana, Ohio. He was the second child of Benjamin Firestone and A. Catherine Flickinger. Firestone graduated from Columbiana High School and then completed a business college course in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1895, he married Idabelle Smith, a composer and songwriter from Jackson, Michigan. The couple had five sons and one daughter.

First Ventures

After completing his business course, Firestone took a job with his uncle’s business, the Columbus Buggy Company. By 1892, he had become the district manager in charge of Michigan sales. However, in 1896 the buggy company went bankrupt.

That same year, with financial support from a friend, Firestone moved his family to Chicago, where he opened a rubber wheels company. In 1899, he sold the company and earned a profit of almost $42,000. Firestone continued to be interested in the tire business and how it would be affected by the emerging automobile industry. By the beginning of the twentieth century, he had acquired a patent for a process of attaching rubber tires to wheels.

Mature Wealth

In 1900, Firestone relocated his family to Akron, Ohio, where many of the country’s tire manufacturers were based. With $10,000 and his tire patent, Firestone and a group of investors opened the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company on August 3, 1900. At the company’s inception, Firestone owned 50 percent of the corporation. During the first few years in business, the company sold tires manufactured by other firms and did not make much of a profit. In 1903, Firestone not only began to manufacture his own tires but also started to make a specially designed pneumatic tire for automobiles. In 1906, Henry Ford ordered two thousand sets of tires from Firestone. In 1907, Firestone’s growing company sold 105,000 tires at a profit of $538,177. That same year, Firestone began marketing a tire with dismountable rim that allowed both the wheel and the tire to be removed together. This innovation eventually became known as the spare tire.

By 1913, Firestone’s tire sales had exceeded $15 million, and he was ranked as one of the Big Five in the tire industry, alongside Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, B. F. Goodrich, U.S. Rubber, and Fisk Rubber. In 1923, Firestone introduced the balloon tire, which eventually became the standard for most American automobiles. In 1924, he and Ford worked together to break Great Britain’s monopoly on the world’s rubber supply. In 1926, they purchased a million acres of land in Liberia and developed a plantation that provided them with an independent source of rubber.

In 1928, Firestone opened his first “one stop service center” that provided customers with numerous automobile-related services, including gasoline, oil changes, brake services, and tires. In 1932, Firestone stepped down as company president, while his five sons continued to take active roles in the business. By 1937, the company was supplying more than a quarter of all automobile tires in the United States and had capital in excess of $108 million. Firestone died of a coronary thrombosis at his winter home in Miami Beach, Florida, on February 7, 1938.

Legacy

Harvey Samuel Firestone’s interest in rubber tires and their use on automobiles made his family-owned tire manufacturing business a leader in the tire industry. Many of his innovations became standards for the automobile industry, including the creation of his company’s own rubber supply and the conception of the modern garage, where numerous automobile services could be offered to customers at one location. Firestone’s business ingenuity and his tire inventions earned him the distinction of being one of America’s wealthiest industrialists.

Bibliography

Dickson, Paul, and William Hickman. Firestone: A Legend, a Century, a Celebration. New York: Forbes, 2000.

Firestone, Harvey Samuel, Jr. Man on the Move: The Story of Transportation. New York: Putnam, 1967.

Lief, Alfred. The Firestone Story: A History of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. New York: Whittlesey House, 1951.